The Year of Mission, part of the National Eucharistic Revival, has begun in earnest! While many parishes around the country are embarking on this mission in different ways, you might be asking yourself: What can I do?
The Walk With One initiative is a great place to start. Living out the Christian call to evangelize and share the faith with just one person can simplify and make manageable the sometimes overwhelming command of Christ to “go out and baptize all nations.”
“The simplest way to think about Walk With One is that it's trying to take what can feel like an overwhelming responsibility to evangelize and share the faith with the whole world and break it down to something that's really achievable, which is to prayerfully discern one person you feel like God is inviting you to walk with more intentionally this year,” said Andrew McGown, executive director of Evangelization and Family Life Ministries for the Archdiocese.
The Walk With One initiative was launched at the national level with the conclusion of the National Eucharistic Congress in Indianapolis, Ind., in July, which gathered over 60,000 faithful from all around the U.S. Attendees were commissioned to bring Walk With One to their own parishes as a model of spiritual accompaniment to introduce both seekers and non-seekers alike to the Gospel.
Walk With One breaks down the important but often intimidating work of evangelizing someone into four steps.
First, identify someone you feel the Lord is calling you to walk with. It is crucial that you don’t pick the person but rather allow the Holy Spirit to guide your decision.
Second, intercede for that person in prayer and ask God for the grace to accompany them well. Pray that the Lord would remove obstacles to encountering him from their heart.
Third, connect with that person by building a friendship with them. This can take many forms, such as meeting for coffee or going to lunch; the most important piece is being a genuine friend to them and accompanying them in their struggles and joys as you allow them to accompany you in your own.
Lastly, invite that person to take the next step in entering a relationship with Jesus. This could take weeks or months; it is all in the Lord’s timing. When the time is right, you could invite them to a small group or even ask them if they’d like to join you for Mass on Sunday.
“It's super simple, just trying to activate people in the mission of the Church in a very achievable and simple way,” McGown said. “That's what Walk With One is nationally, and then here locally, what we're trying to do is just provide a few resources to make a couple of those steps a little easier.”
The Walk With One initiative is sure to bear fruit in the national Church and beyond as the faithful are invited to share the grace and zeal from the Eucharistic Revival with others. Here in the Archdiocese of Denver, much of the evangelization and equipping efforts of the last several years fall perfectly in line with the national Walk With One initiative.
“This is a Eucharistic Revival initiative, but the Archdiocese has already been doing some of this stuff for the last few years,” McGown shared.
Some ways the Archdiocese of Denver has been infusing the practice of accompaniment into its greater mission include evangelization workshops hosted at over a dozen parishes and implementing Catholic Christian Outreach studies that emphasize the accompaniment of others into a relationship with Jesus. Additionally, the Archdiocese is actively exploring ways that trained sponsors could play a more central role in the Order of Christian Initiation to more intentionally accompany people entering the Church.
Although the National Eucharistic Revival will come to an end on the Feast of Corpus Christi in 2025, it will mark both a new beginning and a continuation of the mission of the Church. Walk With One is a concrete and easily actionable way to take the grace poured from the Revival and the Congress to, as Christ commands, “go out and baptize all nations.”
“This is foundational for all of us,” McGown concluded. “We are just naming it to remind ourselves that this is the universal call we all share to walk with people around us, especially those who haven't had a conversion yet.”
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For more information about the Walk With One initiative and additional Eucharistic Revival resources, visit archden.org/revival.
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